Our wonderful English Language...

Try this after a large single malt lol

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

English Pronunciation by G. Nolst Trenité

Amazing, isn't it, that anyone not born to speak English can ever get the hang of it?
Thanks for this.

You can see the richness of our language Your Pinkness! How many single malts have you had by the way? You might at least have added a wee footnote to explain what Melpomene is?

The languages where proninciation and spelling closely correspond in a logical way (such as German and Finnish) also tend to have complicated grammar and come with long tables of changing word endings. I believe Spanish is an exception, being reasonably easy in both departments. English grammar is very simple but the spelling and pronunciation a minefield. The languages which have the closest correspondence between spelling and pronunciation owe this to having been suppressed languages not received in polite society and hardly ever written down, but still spoken, until a relatively late stage in history, when the academics and language campaigners creating a written record were able to fit spelling to pronunciation. The English tendency to slur words, though, is an additional factor: I imagine conscience, for example, was once con-science and not conshunce.

George Bernard Shaw, a campaigner for spelling reform, claimed that GHOTI was pronounced FISH: FH is F as in ROUGH; O is I as in women; and TI is SH as in ACTION. However, what such campaigns ignore is that to make the spelling agree completely with the pronunciation would make the origin and meaning of words much more obscure: that conshunce was from science (knowledge) and akshun from the verb to act would no longer be obvious.

So let's start a campaign to pronounce words as they're spelt and start on 1st January 2012. On second thoughts, this would put paid to some interesting regional variations, such as my pronouncing recognise as RECKONISE, a Wearsider's anti-racism as ANTI-RYYEHCISM and a Norfolk person's pronunciation of his capital city as NARJ - let alone "Ye'll frighten the buds, Jummy", unless that be counted a separate language.

There is, of course, no reason a written language needs to have its alphabet correspond with the sounds in the spoken language (e.g., Chinese). In English, however (whether the British, American or some other version), we pretend that it does, and urge readers to "sound out" a new word they encounter It's amazing, though, isn't it, how many different results they can arrive for a given word while following this prescription?

What they also ignore is that pronunciation changes, and will continue to do so. To update spelling means that, unless translated, older texts would become unreadable by subsequent generations. Changing usage and meaning of words already pose a challenge. Now imagine a student who was taught to read in a new phonetic spelling trying to make sense of Shakespeare.

Just the one Blimpy, medicinal purposes


This is just about how my teenage half sister and her friends communicate, it is actually quite scary lol.

What can we do, our language pulls words from so many other traditions, besides the British, exceptions are the rule. It is a miracle any of us can manage the reading and writing it takes to pen a naughty spanking story.

If yuo cna raed tihs yuo hvae a gdoo garsp of teh Egnilsh lnagauge

Strange that you can isn't it?

I saw in a TV documentary one time that the reason the English language has so many inconsistencies is because it was still a developing language and different regions in England had different dialects. Before this could be all sorted out along came Gutenberg and his printing press and froze all these differences in place. Now all these regional dialects with their varied pronunciations and spellings are part of the language in one big hodge-podge.